The Battle of Britain Five Months That Changed History, May—October 1940 by James Holland (z-lib.org).epub

and German troops they now had no alternative but to escape; and unlike
the tens of thousands of refugees jamming the roads, Jan and his colleagues
were fortunate enough to have a means of getting away.
It was far from plain sailing, however. Trouble with Romanian border
guards meant that Jan, along with two other pilots as passengers, hastily
took off again, heading south until running out of fuel some twenty-five
miles from Bucharest. They eventually reached the city and from there, via
Constanza and Beirut, to Marseilles. It was now the end of November 1939,
and at Salon-de-Provence Jan and his two Polish friends joined the French
Armée de l’Air.
Their services were hardly required, however. They were told there was
a shortage of aircraft, which was nonsense, so spent idle days in the bistros
and brothels of Lyons, where they were stationed. Eventually, they were
formed into a Polish Squadron, but remained on the Lorraine front, behind
the Maginot Line. Jan and three other Polish pilots were then transferred to
another squadron in a fighter group made up of a motley assortment of
pilots and aircraft and stationed near Tours. He had still barely flown even
once the German offensive began. On 6 June, the pilots were in the middle
of lunch when reports of German aircraft reached them. Jan and his fellow
Poles immediately jumped up. ‘What’s the hurry?’ said their French
commander. ‘We haven’t finished eating.’
Jan’s squadron was eventually given a modern Morane 406 and on 10
June they finally flew their first proper combat sortie over France. They
were soon tangling with a mass of Me 109s, and horribly outnumbered.
Although Jan managed to shoot one down, he and his three fellow Poles
were shot down themselves, and he was the only survivor – and only just.
Having safely bailed out he was then surrounded by a bunch of hostile
French soldiers who in the nick of time realized he was Polish and thus on
their side.
Jan was eventually given a new plane on 13 June – an American Curtiss
P-36 – but by harmonizing and testing his guns at one end of the airfield, he
caused panic. Mistaking his gun test for Germans attacking them, the rest of
the fighter group began taking off. Such was the prevailing mood of
defeatism; it only needed a spark and panic quickly spread.
As France crumbled, Jan and his colleagues made their way to
Bordeaux, where, joining forces with a Polish artillery officer and his
battery, they managed to get a ride to Plymouth on a Polish collier. They